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Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! Let’s start with a quiz: Who’s on the cover of British Vogue’s September issue?
Trick question!! The answer is All Women Are Beautiful <3 (by which I mean One Woman is beautiful and All Women are morphing into One Woman).
Anyway. Onto the links…
IN THIS ISSUE: Distortion! Blurrealness! The difference between cosmetic enhancement and gender affirming care! A better name for Lindsay Lohan’s new beauty brand! Collagen-infused faux-Doritos! Clayface-esque sheet masks! Hitchcockian mascara ads! Missing lips! Dying for beauty! Theodore Roosevelt! Neutrogena backlash! Hairballs! Moisturizer infused with molecular sunshine! Rhode rage! Narcissism! & more!
I was a guest on The Guardian’s Today In Focus podcast with Helen Pidd the other week. Listen here for our conversation on aesthetic inflation, cosmetic transparency, how GLP-1s are feeding the beauty industry, and the general pressure to stick a needle in/slice off/suture up your face.
The Lowbrow Book Club is reading Ways of Seeing by John Berger this month! A fave quote from Chapter 1: “All reproductions more or less distort.” We’ll discuss how this applies to reproductions of the face or body on the face or body (e.g., no makeup makeup, “undetectable” tweakments, shapewear) when the book club meets on Zoom at the end of the month. Join us!!
I wonder how Berger would interpret the latest E.l.f. Cosmetics tagline: be so blurreal.
I’m sort of fascinated by the way the pun turns a plea for realness (“be so for real”) into a plea for hyperrealness (“blurred” features, as in an image or video) — an accurate reflection of our current desire for distortion, I’d say. We’re living in blurreal times!! (More on blur as the defining aesthetic of the moment here.)
Parker Molloy wrote about Pete Hegseth’s plan for the “High-T Department of War” and why the go-to liberal “gotcha” for news like this — that’s just gender-affirming care — “trivializes trans healthcare and misreads what we’re up against.” Per Molloy:
“Here’s the message a casual reader actually takes away: transition care belongs in the same drawer as testosterone boosters, Botox, and Elon Musk’s hair plugs. And once it’s in that drawer, it’s about as ‘medically necessary’ as anything else in there. Which is to say: completely optional.
That phrase, medically necessary, is doing far more work than it gets credit for. It’s the standard insurers use to decide what they’ll cover and what they’ll wave off as cosmetic, and ‘cosmetic’ is already their favorite exit ramp when a trans patient’s claim hits the desk.
… I’m far from the first trans person to notice this. Back in January, after a publication described Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler as gender-affirming care, Woodlief McCabe wrote in Autostraddle about how insulting the comparison feels from the receiving end, and where the logic ends up if you follow it: ‘If everything is gender affirming care, then nothing is.’ He’s right. A category that stretches to cover lip filler and hair plugs is a category insurers and legislators will be delighted to treat like lip filler and hair plugs. They’ve been trying to file us under ‘cosmetic’ for years. The gotcha does the paperwork for them.”
Yes, yes, yes.
Post-(probably surgical)-glow up, Lindsay Lohan is manufacturing a line of beauty products. She’s calling it Linlo (short for Lindsay Lohan). I think she should call it ha (short for Lindsay Lohan). The joke is on whoever buys it!
Who Wore It Better: Kylie Jenner or Clayface?
(Maybe Kylie Cosmetics will finally come out with that skincare-for-smokers line I’ve been predicting…)
Who Wore It Better Part 2: Influencer wearing a Khloud by Khloé Kardashian x SharkNinja Cryoglow LED Light Mask or Jason Voorhees?
(The Khloud-branded SharkNinja mask was custom-made to celebrate the arrival of Khloud’s collagen-infused faux-Doritos, which is its own kind of horror story.)
Beauty brands are explicitly referencing horror lately, too.
Makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes teased her soon-to-launch mascara with a Hitchcockian short titled “MASCARA DOESN’T HAVE TO BE SCARY.” (Is anyone scared of mascara?)
Sarah Creal debuted its pHLip Liner Personal Lip Contour with missing posters that read, “Missing: One set of lips—full, even, defined. Last seen sometime before my 40th birthday. I want them back.” (The kidnapper is life itself!!)
And, of course, The Morgue Gaze continues its slow march through the beauty industry in ways both silly and serious.
Silly: Liquid Death’s collaboration with Goodwipes marries my two favorite trends — The Morgue Gaze and butthole beauty — by declaring “death to dry” anuses.
Serious: Last month, Adriana García, a 31-year-old Mexican content creator, “reportedly underwent cosmetic surgery before her death,” People reports, and 27-year-old Elizabeth Baron died while receiving an “anti-aging” NAD+ injection in New York City. (Hailey Bieber popularized NAD+ injections on an episode of The Kardashians a few years back; “I’m gonna NAD for the rest of my life and I'm never gonna age,” she said. Unfortunately Baron can say the same.)
I don’t really know what to do with the below information but it needs to be shared:
These images — a juvenile before-and-after weight loss cartoon (??) and a baby crawling across a white carpet overlayed with the text, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there. - Theodore Roosevelt” (???) — are from the “holistic wellness” website of Luis Rojas Cabrera, the unlicensed practitioner who killed Baron. If your cosmetic injector promotes their anti-aging/pro-slimming protocols like this, please, please, please triple-check their qualifications. Or cancel.
Actress Hayden Panettiere, 36, died from an apparent overdose on Sunday, and the news is reigniting a movement to #BoycottNeutrogena. In May, Panettiere claimed Neutrogena attempted to fire her from her decade-long spokesperson position for violating her contract’s “morals clause” by speaking publicly about her postpartum depression. The brand’s recent Instagram posts are full of comments and community notes like this:
Again, the juxtaposition of the imperative to remain young-looking and the tragedy of young death is bleak.
K18 rolled a circular mass of discarded human hair + destroyed wigs throughout NYC last week. The hairball, a promotion for its FutureIQ Biomimetic Hair Longevity Serum, was meant to “represent the 167 billion hairs New Yorkers lose to shedding every single day.” Should I do a FLESH WORLD promo where I roll a hairball of similar size throughout the city to represent the amount of hairs New Yorkers grow every single day? Because those numbers are about the same.
“A proprietary mood-boosting ingredient” called “molecular sunshine” is infused in all of beauty brand Good Day’s products, BeautyMatter reports. (Ed. note: The universe mass-produces sunshine for free.) For this reason, Ulta is categorizing Good Day as wellness rather than skincare — which is fine with founder Chris Hobson (also the President and CEO of Rare Beauty Brands). “If you just look at the total dollars, [the wellness opportunity] dwarfs the beauty opportunity in terms of market size,” he said.
And he’s right! “My £1,000-A-Month Wellness Obsession Was Making Me Sick” writes Katie O’Malley for British Vogue. (Gotta love the SEO slug for this one: /wellness-expensive.) (Perhaps Good Day can tap the wellness-made-me-sick recovery market next?)
In the-industry-is-running-out-of-brand-names news: Newcomer DEAU is joining Dieux, The Doux, DUA, and Dae (which maybe fits in better with Ouai and Saie??) in the beauty aisle.
The internet recently went wild for an imaginary collaboration between the US Department of Transportation and Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand, Rhode.
Fake products included lip gloss in shades like Rhode Rage, Stop Traffic, and Passenger Princess and a construction-orange hat emblazoned with the phrase “RHODE WORK.” A sampling of fan reactions:
“I thought this was real and was quite impressed with the creativity of the Rhode team.”
“Yeah I’d buy THIS”
“I wish this was real”
“We NEED this”
“I need @rhode to make at LEAST the hat”
I fear a made-up marketing campaign generating this level of hype marks the end of the Rhode for civilization… (Although I would support the collab if proceeds went toward constructing a national high-speed rail system.)
Ordinary Unhappiness is in the midst of a multi-part, must-listen podcast series on narcissism. In Part 2, the hosts mention that narcissism and narcotics share the same root — narc, or “numbness.” Which is making me think about the relationship between narcissism and beauty, and narcotics and beauty, and how today’s standard of beauty is predicated on numbness, or at least on the affect of numbness: paralyzed muscles, erased expression lines, botulinum toxin-blocked emoting. Feels related to my theory of “anesthetic aesthetics” or “cosmetic coping” (i.e., using beauty products to blunt the pain of beauty culture).
More recommended reading:
“In the Air They Breathe: Impact of Skin-Lightening on Children” by Amira Adawe for The Global Beauty Brief
“‘Anti-ageing is anti-life’: why longevity culture is just ageism in a lab coat” by Theresa McPhail for The Guardian
“How Cosmetic Surgery In India Made Looking Untouched A Luxury” by Ria Bhatia for The Established
Finally: I’m co-hosting a newsletter writing retreat with Molly Rosen and the Brooklyn Writers Collective in upstate New York from November 5th - 8th! The weekend will include lectures on newsletter strategy and structure from me, creative workshops with Molly (whom I’ve personally taken many classes from over the years), and connection with fellow writers of all levels. Also: hikes, naps, wandering in downtown Woodstock, shared meals, good snacks, good stories, hot cider. Check out the class details here and let me know if you have any questions! I’d love to see any/all aspiring newsletter writers there.
You’re Gonna Die Someday No Matter How Young You Look,
Jessica
Wow, the pace of malarkey entering the marketplace seems to be quickening, and the products are growing even more malarkey-er. As an elderly reader, I have to say: Looks like I will be stepping off this mortal coil at just about the right time. Thank you for all you do, Jessica! I don't know how you maintain your sanity!
As a 53 year old, I must say I would’ve LOVED the outfit on that cover model back when I was a freshman in high school in the late 1980s. Now? Not so much. :) Also, I read DEAU the same way Homer Simpson says Doh!